The paper analyses and compares the domestic and cross-border effects of US and euro area unconventional monetary policy measures on 24 major advanced and emerging economies, based on an estimated global vector error-correction model (GVECM). Unconventional monetary policies are measured using...

Household debt levels relative to GDP have risen rapidly in many countries over the past decade. We investigate the macroeconomic impact of such increases by employing a novel estimation technique proposed by Chudik et al (2016), which tackles the problem of endogeneity present in traditional...

The global finance crisis prompted central banks in many countries to cut short-term policy rates to near zero levels. Yet, lending rates did not fall as much as the decline in policy rates would have suggested. We argue that comparing lending rates to policy rates is misleading: banks do not...

The recent global financial crisis, the Great Recession and the subsequent implementation of a variety of unconventional policy measures have raised the issue of how to correctly measure the stance of monetary policy when policy interest rates reach the zero lower bound (ZLB). In this paper, we...

Motivated by the traditional business cycle approach of Burns and Mitchell (1946), we explore cyclical similarities in financial conditions over time in order to improve our understanding of financial cycles. Looking back at 120 years of data, we find that financial cycles exhibit behaviour...

In the recent years several commentators hinted at an increase of the correlation between equity and commodity prices, and blamed investment in commodity-related products for this. First, this paper investigates such claims by looking at various measures of correlation. Next, we assess what are...

How do monetary policy spillovers complicate the trade-offs faced by central banks face when responding to commodity prices? This question takes on particular relevance when monetary authorities find it difficult to accurately diagnose the drivers of commodity prices. If monetary authorities...

A frequently neglected aspect of financial booms and busts - financial cycles - is their impact on fiscal positions. And yet, the latest financial crisis and history show that these cycles can wreak havoc with public finances. After reviewing the impact of financial cycles on fiscal positions,...

Biofuel policies are frequently mentioned in the policy and academic debates because of their potential impact on food prices. In 2005, the United States authorities passed legislation under which corn-based ethanol became in practice the only available gasoline additive. Some studies have then...

We provide a measure of the output gap that filters out the impact of the commodity and net capital inflows booms for Latin American countries. These two factors temporarily boost output and so are likely to push up estimates of potential growth in the region to unrealistic levels, thereby...